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Colossus V
There are few hive worlds in the Carthax sector that can match V for sheer volume of output. As a producer of war materiel, the planet is exceptionally important to the war effort on the border with the Alykia sector and a practically constant stream of mass conveyors departs the orbit of V swollen with ammunition, weapons and war machines. V was a world of temperate lands in the distant past, and was the first of the system's planets settled by man prior to the Age of Strife. Little is known of that early period, as the following millennia brought low most of the world's achievements. When the Great Crusade came across the Colossus system, it was met with savages living amongst the dark, dilapidated shells of great hives. A period of forceful re-education and induction into the empire of man followed, and the Adeptus Mechanicus moved in to repair the enormous industrial potential of the world. It was still four centuries before the manufactora of V managed to fill the equivalent of single mass conveyor, a volume the planet manages on a monthly basis now. There are sixteen hives on V, covering 63% of the available landmass. The most remarkable is Nyod, which is sinking in a sludge sea. As recently as the 37th millennium, Nyod sat on dry land, but it has been sinking into the crust of V, its astronomical mass compressing the bedrock beneath its foundations for ten thousand years. Around the turn of the thirty eighth millennium, Nyod sunk below sea level, and the polluted oceans of the world diverted to form a stinking, sucking moat around the hive. A full third of the hive now sits below the waves, some of it surviving the enormous pressures its depths are subjected to through provenance rather than design, but most of the hive bottom is flooded. The lower levels are anything but uninhabited though; heretics and madmen stalk the driest corridors, gilled and web-footed mutants swim through the flooded sections, and archaeotech prospectors in enormous armoured diving suits battle through the hordes in search of forgotten machinery and processed goods. Serretus is the nominal capital of V, a title awarded on the basis of size alone. Home to twenty-one billion, it is a claustrophobic crush of hovels strung between manufactora, workshops, cathedrals and forges. They say in Serretus that everything that the hive exports is baptised in sweat, and in the hot press of workers that surround the production lines it's easy to understand how. Inhabitants of the hive are paid for their labours via a nutrient rich gel that is pumped into their veins via a system of tubes that attach to implanted vents on their forearms. Each factorum provides the gel from lines above the work floor, so if a citizen wishes to imbibe the nutrients vital for a prolonged life, he or she must work. The manufactora are always oversubscribed with workers, and it's not uncommon for one to queue for days to get a shift. Entire families crowd around a single workstation, parents feeding their children while they work as all are implanted not long after birth. Children are encouraged to begin work as soon as they are able, but well-fed, bloated overseers are ever-ready to disable the flow of gel to anyone not working at maximum efficiency. There will always be someone else willing to work at the desired rate at the factorum's doors. For those that cannot work, churches do what they can to provide for them, and black market fungi cultivators and urine purifiers sell their produce in the back alleys, ever watchful for the vigilant labour enforcement officers that execute any who attempt to break Lord Governor Elcam of Colossus V's first law: Thou Shalt Work. The hive city Gleor contains the Prastian Straits' sole Inquistorial Fortress. The Mendelstein Keep stands tall amongst the palaces on the exterior shell of the city, its highest levels looking down on the city from the upper troposphere. Named after Lord Inquisitor Secretan Mendelstein, the fortress was constructed in M36 in response to the Reign of Blood and establishment of the Ordo Hereticus. While officially an office of that Ordo, it has been called home by Inqusitors of all affiliations over the millennia. Currently two Inquisitors are in residence, Inquisitor Savant Michaelmas, and Inquisitrix Lu Shong. In addition to materiel produced on the planet's surface, the orbital shipyards of V have produced the system's monitor fleet, numerous transport vessels, as well as thirteen warships over the millennia. The last naval vessel to leave the yards was the Gothic class, Prastian Reaper, in 945.M41. She serves as part of Battlefleet Carthax out of Port Sigilite in the Carthage system. Vessels laid down in the Colossal system have a reputation for power hungry subsystems, and have shortened reactor lives as a result. The third warship laid down in V's shipyards, The Avenger was lost in the warp in 776.M39, a calamity blamed on her failing reactors giving out during a voyage from Iracadia to the Penitence system. Sailors talk of seeing her ghost in the empty void, spectral vox transmissions begging for assistance, and swearing revenge on the shipwrights of V that built her so poorly. Category:Fluff Category:Planets in Al-Gheri sub-sector Category:Planets in Colossus system Category:Carthaxian astrography Category:Declassified